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All hail the peacemakers 20

A second Palestinian journalist has died after being shot by Israeli forces while covering the Gaza protests. Ahmad abu Hussein, 24, succumbed yesterday in an Israeli hospital, 12 days after he was shot in the stomach while wearing a Press flak jacket on April 13. By one report, Abu Hussein was shot by an expanding bullet, from hundreds of meters away.

He was shot a week after journalist Yaser Murtaja was also shot in the torso by an Israeli sniper. Murtaja died early on the morning of April 7.

If you issue a report on human rights, the least you can do is avoid damaging, dismissing or denigrating those rights. But that’s exactly what the U.S. State Department just did in the new edition of the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released on April 20. The targets, no one should be surprised to learn, were the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled on Monday what he said was evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program that could step up pressure on the United States to pull out of a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

"IF YOU want to understand the policy of a nation, look at the map!" Napoleon is supposed to have said.

It is good advice.

If you are living in Israel, these days, you get the impression that the huge State of Israel is dictating to its American vassal what to do about Iran.

President Donald Trump listens and complies. Bibi the Great tells him to tear up the Iranian deal for no obvious reason, and he obeys. He has no choice, poor man.

But then you look at the map, and to your great surprise you discover that the USA is a huge country, while Israel is a mere speck, so small that its name has to be written outside its borders, in the sea.

So what is wrong? Geography, of course, is not the only factor. Israel has some millions of faithful adherents, who are American citizens and have a lot of money. But still.

Can it be that we got the picture wrong? That Trump is not the vassal of Netanyahu, that it's the other way round? That Trump dictates, and Bibi, for all his bluster, just obeys?

I feel like I am standing on a melting ice floe. For decades, I have loved Israel. I want it to thrive as a shining, rights-abiding country. And yet, increasingly, I find I can envision a day when I (or maybe my children) will not want to go there anymore. My Jewish life, which began 25 years ago when I was nearly 50, was always built around that vision of Israel and my deep conviction that it could be the reality. Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/400923/my-zionism-is-fading-one-expulsion-at...

Can it be that we got the picture wrong? That Trump is not the vassal of Netanyahu, that it's the other way round? That Trump dictates, and Bibi, for all his bluster, just obeys?

​This is an important point. I believe it is true. The relationship between Israel and the USA hearkens back to the methods of the British Empire.

​One of the things the Brits were good at was finding minorities in their 'territories', and turning that minority into the empire's administrators. Because the new administrators had few friends within their existing societies, they needed to Brits to maintain their position, thus ensuring their loyalty.

Remove American support for Israel, and it wouldn't last long, thus guaranteeing the USA has a loyal (or else) ally in the Middle East. What is amusing is the way the relationship is always portrayed as the USA pleading with Israel to do this, or not do that, like a hand-wringing parent pleading with a grown child. Thus the USA is seen as a 'stabilizing' influence on Israel, and an honest broker in the various dealings with peace negotiations, etc. What a joke.

These are days of great victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for the right wing and for nationalistic Israel. These are days of victory for their path, the path of force, and of their faith, the faith in the chosen people who can do anything they please.

At least 41 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded in protests at the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel on the same day the US fulfils its controversial promise to move its embassy to the contested city of Jerusalem.

Dozens of Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israel on Monday in Gaza as dignitaries convened in Jerusalem for the highly anticipated official opening of the U.S. embassy. At 4:00 P.M., the opening ceremony of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem began at the American consulate in the Arnona neighborhood, which is now the official U.S. Embassy.

Meanwhile, Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem were urged to turn out en masse to protest the embassy move and take part in Tuesday's 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Palestinians term Israel’s creation. Tens of thousands of Palestinians marched on the border with Gaza.

At least 43 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip on Monday as thousands of Palestinians took to the streets across the occupied territory to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, with tensions running high in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank.

While the anniversary of Palestinians being driven from their land is typically commemorated on 15 May, large demonstrations are taking place the day before to accommodate the imminent start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and protest at the inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem.

As the Leonard Cohen song goes, “everybody knows” the two-state solution is dead and gone. Zionism’s 120-year quest to Judaize Palestine – to transform Palestine into the Land of Israel – has been completed. Every Israeli government since 1967 has refused to seriously entertain the notion of a genuinely independent and viable Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. Any possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the OPT has long been buried under the massive “facts on the grounds.” Israel’s Matrix of Control has rendered its control over the entire country permanent.

It is inexcusable for soldiers of a military, especially those under democratic civilian control, to shoot and kill protesters, almost all of whom were unarmed, and who pose no credible threat. Yet at the boundary between Gaza and Israel today Israeli soldiers seem to have done just that. It should make Israelis quail that demonstrators were sprayed with live ammunition with apparent impunity. There were dozens of deaths and hundreds of maimings among the Palestinians who had marched to the border to make a point about their right to return to their ancestral homes. Israel’s army evinced no shame in committing what looks like a war crime. These are serious accusations. Yet they were greeted with little more than a shrug. By blockading Gaza, Israel imprisoned 2 million people behind barbed wire and military towers. Israel treated the violence as a jailer might a prison riot: a tragic fault of the inmates.

“We’re pleased our Hamas brethren understood that the proper way was through a popular, unarmed struggle,” Fatah representatives have said on several occasions recently regarding the Gaza March of Return. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said something similar during his address to the Palestinian National Council last week.

Waving signs that read “Stop the Live Fire” and chanting “Arabs and Jews refuse to be enemies,” hundreds of demonstrators flooded a main Tel Aviv thoroughfare Tuesday blocking traffic in protest of Israel’s firing on Palestinian protesters along the border with Gaza.

More than 60 Palestinians were killed in Monday's clashes, which came the same day the relocated U.S. embassy was inaugurated in Jerusalem. The clashes followed over a month of high casualties as Palestinians protested along the border fence against their living conditions inside Gaza. Monday's protest also marked 70 years since the creation of the state of Israel which displaced over 700,000 Palestinians. They call it the Nakba, Arabic for disaster. Some protestors tried to break through the fence and cross into Israel.

The other day, a thoughtful acquaintance, who is to my right politically, asked me a question. He asked what I’d advise Israel to do when faced with thousands of Palestinians, some likely bent on violence, who are trying to storm the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from the rest of Israel. (I say “rest of Israel” because I believe Gaza still remains under Israeli occupation. Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/401138/israels-choice-to-shoot-palestinians-...